THE BOER. 21 



became fairly good friends, this farmer may be taken 

 as a typical example of the Boer. This man possesses 

 a tract of ^0,000 acres, which is called a farm. 

 Scarcely any of this domain is cultivated ; it embraces 

 part of a range of hills which forms a boundary, and 

 contains several isolated eminences as well, whilst in 

 most places its level ground is strewn with rocky 

 debris. These hills are sparsely wooded and it is 

 from them that he obtains the firewood he sells at 

 Pretoria and Johannesburg. He lives in a small and 

 wretchedly kept and furnished house, the most con- 

 spicuous articles of which are a small Dutch organ and 

 a large family Bible, for he is a conventionally pious 

 man. He cultivates a very small patch of his farm 

 and leaves the rest, as nature gives it, to grazing pur- 

 poses, and relies on his flocks and herds. Towards 

 the end of the winter he fires the veld, the withered 

 and dried grasses of which readily burn, and this allows 

 to the new shoots, that will rise after the rains, light 

 and air to commence growth. At that time of the 

 year the illumined horizon almost nightly denotes the 

 process of this primitive farming, and day reveals 

 dismal black areas which tell the same tale. The 

 young grass soon starts, and in a fortnight from the 

 conflagration I have seen scattered and small patches 

 of bright green, even before the rains have commenced. 

 But these continuous fires help to keep the country in its 

 present treeless condition, for nothing but a few stunted 

 trees of the hardest wood can withstand the ravages 

 of the flames, whilst young seedlings have no chance of 

 surviving their first season's growth *. I believe the 



o o 



* The same thing occurred in the early days of the settlers in North 

 America, when the Indians annually burnt the grass on their pasture- 

 grounds. " The oaks bore the annual scorching, at least fora certain time, 

 but if they had been indefinitely continued, they would very probably have 

 been destroyed at last. The soil would Lave then been much in the 

 prairie condition, and would have needed nothing but grazing for a long 

 succession of years to make the resemblance perfect. That the annual tires 

 alone occasioned the peculiar character of the oak openings, is proved by 

 the fact, that as soon as the Indians had left the country, young trees of 

 many species sprang up and grew luxuriously upon them." See Marsh, 

 quoting from Dwight's Travels- (' Man and Nature,' p. ]36). 



